Navigating between gender regimes in transnational conjugalities
Résumé
Since the beginning of the 21st century, French-Russian marriages have taken a prominent place in the landscape of binational marriages in France. They come in third place behind French-Algerian and French-Moroccan marriages when they involve a man of French nationality and a woman born abroad. Conversely, French women almost never marry Russian men. How can we understand the development of these new intimacies in which gender dynamics are central? Based on a multi-sited ethnography between France, Russia and Belarus, I will show in this paper, by mobilizing a few exemplary cases, that the members of transnational couples circulate between different regimes of gender, intimacy and kinship and that the choice of the country of settlement is not random at all. On the contrary, it reflects a variety of gender projects that partly conform to the norms of the country where the couple resides.